I want to say a bit more about "distracting pointlessness", not in the spirit of vindictiveness but in case there is a future in this activity for somebody else. If so, s/he should not have to go through what I have experienced and perhaps if I explain, that can be avoided. https://twitter.com/joannaperkins0/status/1264253303405400066

I've had two learning phases about anagrams, the "slow" period from 2017 to Autumn 2019 and the "fast" period since then. The difference is that in Autumn 2019 I threw caution to the winds and started posting dozens of my attempted anagrams on Twitter (more on that below).

There are two ways one can learn in this game. A) by suggestion; and B) by feedback. That is, Teach can either say "why don't you have a look at airports now?" or s/he can respond to your efforts with a thumbs up/thumbs down. The trouble is, Teach isn't one person--YOU'RE the

connecting hub in all this, and Teach is, in reality, dozens of people on the ground each with their own little bit of the picture. Still, the broad schema applies--learning by suggestion or learning by feedback.

IRL, people who have information are usually reluctant to surface

I guess. (Otherwise, why send someone in with a camera bag and a loud voice?) So, there is a risk of missing both feedback and suggestions. And speaking personally, the chance of missing any attempt at instruction is increased if Teach is, in fact, just a series of shouty,

critical, aggressive or passive aggressive encounters with anyone and everyone--encounters that drive you into a hibernated, isolated state with hands metaphorically over ears singing "la la la, I can't hear you".

I am not aware of having learned a single thing about anagrams...

or drugs, about organised crime or security, about violence or patterning, IRL. I don't say that for emphasis. I've been through my notes and my recollections and I do not think I took one step forward on an IRL basis. (Someone sent me the vesselfinder website--

that is the nearest I could come to identifying an instance of IRL assistance--but I didn't think about that until I realised, in the virtual world, that I needed a guide to seaports.)

The way I learned in the "slow" period was simply by giving...

myself feedback based on the neatness of the gram. That is to say, I would be happier with a 'gram that avoided abbreviations and a trail of single letter signifiers. Every once in a while, I would have an epiphany simply based on the way the letters fell out beautifully.

But that method is hugely inefficient: slow and prone to false positives.

(Moreover, during the "slow" period I was posting 'grams to a private space so, presumably, any legitimate security op was unable to read them. Perhaps people thought they were contributing to the...

HTTWD Playbook. I'm not sure.)

I feel deeply embarrassed by the "slow" period now. I anagrammed anything and everything--leaflets through my front door, advertising slogans, emails at work, forewords in books, significant numbers of presidential tweets... I practically

anagrammed the Evening Standard wholesale every night--certainly I anagrammed all the headlines and subtitles. And Wikipedia. OMG did I anagram Wikipedia: historical entries, events, people, entries for songs and chemicals and...

I got no sleep and I still got everything wrong!

That is, I mistook the precise reasons why people were using anagrams as well as the way in which they were using them. (The funny thing is, the very first things I noticed--patterns and people still hold true.) But I did improve.

Then there was talk of a Kurdish genocide.

And for some reason I just couldn't bear it any more. I felt that all the evil in the world had to be connected somehow and that I should do my bit to distract and unsettle it, I suppose. So I started posting the anagrams to Twitter and that is when the "fast" learning began.

Because, of course, once I did that, I got volumes of unthreatening feedback and the people who engaged with me seemed to know what they were doing. So I made quite rapid progress and in these past six months I've learnt not only how to be a better 'gramster but I've also...

developed some idea of a good teaching methodology.

One of the things that we all need is a very high tolerance for failure. And that's mostly what I find--with the exception of some accounts that blunder into the whole thing heavy-handed--people on Twitter know that if you

start shouting "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!" at someone for every bad 'gram you'll end up scarring her for life. Because many of them will be wrong.

They say in a good marriage 80% of feedback will be positive and that seems like a good ratio for anagramming too. Celebrate the hits

if you want and plant suggestions by all means but avoid announcing a "miss" in a stentorian voice for the benefit of people at the back of the class. Just recycle the 'gram and bring it back for another go.

Some people on here are fantastic tutors, absolutely amazing.

By which I mean, in particular, that they figure out where your thoughts are (from Tweets, I mean, not psychically!) and produce a learning anagram that will usefully leverage that preoccupation.

So, I'm broadly quite content on here.

And if I find I'm not? Well, unlike IRL, there's always the mute button!

But what I wanted to explain is the "counterproductive" part of what was happening before, in 2017-2018. Not only did I shut down IRL psychologically and emotionally--the

figurative effort to stuff my fingers in my ears and sing "la la la"--but I also tried to distance myself from everyone perpetrating what I saw as a kind of assault--bullying or sub-clinical bullying in some cases. So, that was counterproductive to moving forward.

But worse,

my universal theory for what was happening involved my hypothesising a conspiracy to damage me in any way possible, including reputationally. That made me much more nervous than I would otherwise have been and it deterred me from trying to post anagrams online, which in turn...

delayed the start of the "fast" learning period.

So, perhaps the easiest thing is simply to conclude that no legitimate security operation or similar could have been that inefficient and counterproductive and all-round, well, illogical, which means that all those codes from

"Henry Black" to "Camera Bag" and a hundred others were pushed for some other reason. But, just in case, I'm posting this thread so that anyone else arriving in this strange, strange place, knows what is helpful and what isn't.